Would this unbalance the game?

[Azeem]

Would this unbalance the game - have units have a population cost while increasing the city growth requirement to 3 food? At the same time, the units would have only a fraction of their original shield cost. Has anyone tried this?

[HazieDaVampire]

i made age of sail vessels take one civilian (Since during that time a crew could consist of a load of pesants picked out of the crowd), it seemed ok, made ships more valuble.

I didn't change anthing else.

[The Mad Monk]

It would give a decided advantage to civs in "breadbasket" regions, as opposed to hilly or (God forbid!) mountainous regions. I wouldn't do it.

[Bane Star]

I saw this somewhere else

I read a thread someone asked about this idea, I tried it out for fun, It can work but you gotta tweak a few things here and there.

I made any human based troop require the Pop cost of 1 and reduced the shield cost acording to the materials needed, since the sheild costs of the low end units are allready so low I had to increase the shield bonuses for the opening town, and added an early city improvement -req Iron working- Blacksmith (add +50% shields). This makes the Granary a REALLY worthwhile building (usually I dont bother with a granary until a city is size 5 or greater) so I had to slightly adjust its building cost (and all other buildings by 1 or 2 extra shield lines) Then of course the cities take so long to grow, and so long to do anything worthwhile, since most of the population is being trained for combat, So I had a look at how long a city takes to grow on average terrains, and how many troops you usually produce, and then adjusted the food production in each terrain, and then since most terrains are either 1 or 2 food, and I increased some from 1 to 2 or 2 to 3, this jumps too high, so I also had to increase the food required to improve the town, which took a little calculation. But I think it works ok. The AI has a little difficulty in getting things going, So I can increase the difficulty to Regent levels minimum (and scale accordingly), It takes around 10 minutes to do this, I haven't any new graphics for blacksmith and most of my values are for my own mod, that I'm still working on, I cant post the XBIC here, but thats why I wrote what I did so you can do the same for yourself

Have fun